Survey Shows U.S. Religious Tolerance

Although a majority of Americans say religion is very important to them,
nearly three-quarters of them say they believe that many faiths besides their
own can lead to salvation, according to a survey by the Pew Forum on Religion
and Public Life.

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The report, the U.S. Religious
Landscape Survey, reveals a broad trend toward tolerance and an ability
among many Americans to hold beliefs that might contradict the doctrines of
their professed faiths.

For example, 70 percent of Americans affiliated with a religion or
denomination said they agreed that “many religions can lead to eternal life,”
including majorities among Protestants and Catholics. Among evangelical
Christians, 57 percent agreed with the statement, and among Catholics, 79
percent did.

Among minority faiths, more than 80 percent of Jews, Hindus and Buddhists
agreed with the statement, and more than half of Muslims did.

The findings seem to undercut the conventional wisdom that the more
religiously committed people are, the more intolerant they are, scholars who
reviewed the survey said.

“It’s not that Americans don’t believe in anything,” said Michael Lindsay,
assistant director of the Center on Race, Religion and Urban Life at Rice
University. “It’s that we believe in everything. We aren’t religious purists
or dogmatists.”

The survey confirms findings from previous studies that the most religiously
and politically conservative Americans are those who attend worship services
most frequently, and that for them, the battles against abortion and gay rights
remain touchstone issues.

“At least at the time of the surveys in 2007, cultural issues played a role
in political affiliation,” and economic issues less so, said John C. Green, an
author of the report and a senior fellow on religion and American politics at
Pew. “It suggests that the efforts of Democrats to peel away Republican and
conservative voters based on economic issues face a real limit because of the
role these cultural issues play.”

For all respondents, the survey’s margin of sampling error is plus or minus
one percentage point. For smaller subgroups of religions or denominations, the
margin of sampling error is larger, ranging from 2 to 11 points.

The nationwide survey, which is based on telephone interviews with more than
35,000 adults from May 8 to Aug. 13, 2007, is the second installment of a broad
assessment Pew has undertaken of trends and characteristics of the country’s
religious life. The first part of the report, published in February, depicted a
fluid and diverse national religious life marked by people moving among
denominations and faiths.

According to that report, more than a quarter of adult Americans have left
the faith of their childhood to join another religion or no religion. The survey
indicated that the group that had the greatest net gain was the unaffiliated,
accounting for 16 percent of American adults.

The new report sheds light on the beliefs of the unaffiliated. Like the
overwhelming majority of Americans, 70 percent of the unaffiliated said they
believed in God, including one of every five people who identified themselves as
atheist and more than half of those who identified as agnostic.

“What does atheist mean? It may mean they don’t believe in God, or it could
be that they are hostile to organized religion,” Mr. Green said. “A lot of these
unaffiliated people, by some measures, are fairly religious, and then there are
those who are affiliated with a religion but don’t believe in God and identify
instead with history or holidays or communities.”

The most significant contradictory belief the survey reveals has to do with
salvation. Previous surveys have shown that Americans think a majority of their
countrymen and women will go to heaven, and that the circle is wide, embracing
minorities like Jews, Muslims and atheists. But the Pew survey goes further,
showing that such views are held by those within major branches of Christianity
and minority faiths, too.

Scholars said such tolerance could stem in part from the greater diversity of
American society: that there are more people of minority faiths or no faith and
that “it is hard to hold a strongly sectarian view when you work together and
your kids play soccer together,” Mr. Lindsay said.

But such a view of salvation may also grow out of doctrinal ignorance,
scholars said.

“It could be that people are not very well educated and they are not
expressing mature theological points of view,” said Todd Johnson, director of
the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological
Seminary. “It could also be a form of bland secularism. The real challenge to
religious leaders is not to become more entrenched in their views, but to
navigate the idea of what their religion is all about and how it relates to
others.”

The survey tried to determine how people’s religious affiliation and practice
shaped their views of culture and politics.

As past surveys have shown, this report found that Americans who prayed more
frequently and attended worship services more often tended to be more
conservative and “somewhat more Republican” than other people. Majorities of
Mormons and evangelicals say they are conservative, compared with 37 percent of
Americans over all. (Twenty percent say they are liberal, and 36 percent say
moderate.)

Respondents were evenly split on whether churches should express views about
politics, with evangelicals and black Protestants favoring such activities far
more than people of other faiths.

Nearly two-thirds of respondents favored more government help for the poor,
even if it meant going deeper into debt. Sixty-one percent of respondents also
said “stricter environmental laws and regulations are worth the cost.”

A majority said the United States should pay more attention to problems at
home than those abroad, but in the area of foreign policy, 6 of 10 said that
diplomacy, not military strength, was the best way to ensure
peace.